


say before his face

by loveandthetruth



Category: Uncharted (Video Games)
Genre: Brothers, Character Study, Complicated Relationships, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-30
Updated: 2016-07-30
Packaged: 2018-07-27 16:02:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7624945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loveandthetruth/pseuds/loveandthetruth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam didn't know what he was doing here, didn't have a plan, except to see his brother again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	say before his face

 

He couldn’t stay there forever. Looking out of the window again, for the sixth time, he could still see the light from the window where Nathan was, or should have been. It had been too dark to see his face when he arrived but Sam fancied that there was something familiar about the guy, something recognisable about the gait or the way he dragged a hand through his hair.

It could just be wishful thinking. This whole stupid thing could be wishful thinking.

There was no way that Nathan would have deliberately left Sam behind. When he had woken up, still in prison and three fresh bullet wounds in his belly, he had asked to see his brother and they’d laughed and said, _he’s gone, your brother left you here to rot_. But Sam knew it wasn’t true, not in a million years. _He thinks I’m dead and he had to leave, he had to run._

He was out of the car and walking before he really knew what he was doing. His brother could be in that building. Sam couldn’t not go to him, not after everything. The years asking Rafe to bring Nate in and Rafe turning him down with less and less patience, the years in prison alone but somehow alive and somehow surviving, the years doing whatever he needed to do to make things okay for his brother. As if Sam could ever have left Nathan behind.

The front door was open, and he forced himself to take a breath and knock. Hearing Nathan’s voice again was bizarre, almost beyond belief, but there it was again _–_ it’s too early for this, leave me alone – and it was so much his little brother that it was an elbow in his ribs, sharp and strangely ticklish. He wanted to laugh, needed to, but he couldn’t seem to breathe.

He had to turn away at the sound of movement behind the door, blindly shuffling papers while he blinked away the sudden wetness in his eyes. He didn’t know what to say, didn’t even know what he was doing there, so he went with something glib and maybe funny, as if the only thing he needed to do to make everything right again was to make Nathan laugh.

And there he was standing in front of him a man grown, a ring on his finger, a job with a desk. He supposed fifteen years could do that to a person, even Nathan. Sam was struggling to make it fit. He had been struggling to make it fit for nearly two years. It wasn’t as if he’d had any illusions that time had stood still and the world had waited for him while he had been inside, but the reality of it was something entirely different.

He couldn’t be sure there was anything here for him except unfinished business and painful memories, except maybe Nathan, the little brother that Sam had desperately prayed for, running his mouth off with a million questions as if Sam could possibly have anything worth saying, looking at Sam like he was shiny and new and just what Nathan needed.

Even so, Sam was already desperate to tell Nathan a story; like the stories they had told all those years ago. Stories that had been true only in the ways that mattered to them, but maybe not to anybody else. Stories that had always taken them to the places they needed to go and made them the people they wanted to be.

He had meant to say _Rafe_. What came out of his mouth was _Alcazar_.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from St Francis of Assisi 
> 
> “Blessed is the servant who loves his brother as much when he is sick and useless as when he is well and can be of service to him. And blessed is he who loves his brother as well when he is afar off as when he is by his side, and who would say nothing behind his back he might not, in love, say before his face.”


End file.
